Write of passage By Tals Diaz Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 15:31:00 09/22/2008
ONE NIGHT EVERY YEAR, the finest Filipino wordsmiths tear themselves away from their keypads and blogs, slip into their fanciest evening wear, and head off to a five-star venue to toast the best creators and creations of original Filipino literature. The Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, or The Palancas, is our version of the Pulitzers.
This is the hallowed hall, the exclusive club of scholarly giants exchanging ideas and ink-stained handshakes. Amid the scribblers in this year’s awards, many of them with past medals tucked behind their belts or malongs, was a nervous newbie, a 31-year-old balikbayan in crisp Barong Tagalog, inebriated with the evening’s creative energy.
Meet Miguel Syjuco, new member of the inner sanctum. He is this year’s Grand Palanca winner for his first novel, Ilustrado.
Though Syjuco has lived abroad for the past seven years, many remember him fondly as “Chuck,” a mainstay of the poetry and poison-filled nights of Sanctum, abg’s and Malate back in the mid-’90s.
After graduating from the Ateneo, he founded localvibe.com with three friends; in those days, way before the dotcom rise and fall, it was the seminal online mag. In 2001 he left Manila for his Masters in Creative Writing at Columbia University, and has since lived in New York, Adelaide and Montreal.
Ilustrado was a unanimous winner, and was later praised by Palanca judge Tony Hidalgo as “a very important work.” It is Syjuco’s three-year labor of love, unrequited till now.
The novel is about a great Filipino author, Crispin Salvador, fished out of the Hudson River in New York in 2001. Prolific, celebrated, and despised, Crispin was the Filipino shining star in the West between the ’70s and ’80s before he fell into obscurity.
He was last working on a book that was to catapult him back to fame, about the corrupt roots of many powerful Filipino families. The strange circumstances of Crispin’s death led a young student of his, named Miguel, to investigate whether or not it was indeed suicide as had been reported by the press and police.
Miguel suspects that Crispin’s death is linked to his final novel, which had mysteriously disappeared. He returns to the Philippines to uncover more things about his mentor, but more importantly, Miguel also discovers a lot about himself as a young writer who’s left the country.
With lush prose, a deluge of quotable lines, hilarious Pinoy-isms, and meta-fictional meditations on the writing craft and Filipino diaspora, what is truly notable about Ilustradois the depiction of the dead author Crispin through a meticulous reconstruction of his life’s work with morsels in the form of book excerpts, memoirs, interviews and poetry. It is so convincing that it’s hard to believe Syjuco made it all up, including a Wikipedia entry for the curious Googleite.
Ilustrado is also long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. The day after the Palancas, Syjuco shared some inside stories about his novel.
You worked on Ilustrado for three years. Did you have the Palanca in mind?
I’m working on it for my Ph.D. in Creative Writing. These past three years, nobody has read it, really, except for my girlfriend, Edith, and a couple of other friends. So I was really wondering if I was doing something of merit.
I thought, maybe I should be writing “The Kite Runner” of the Philippines! So this whole Palanca win has somewhat validated it, that it does kinda make sense; the structure does have integrity. That’s why I was very happy to come home to receive the award. It’s a great honor, but it’s also a great affirmation that three years haven’t been wasted.
Can you talk about that structure, a departure from the usual straight narrative?
I’ve created the whole life’s work of the character Crispin Salvador—his essays, interviews, memoirs, poetry, etc. I’ve been able to make this bricolage of literary fragments, so when viewed together, you notice these patterns coming together. Because of its non-linear structure, it encompasses the late 1800s during the time of the ilustrados, the Philippine Assembly under the US, the Huk Rebellion, the Marcos Regime, post-Marcos, until Crispin’s death in 2001. So it’s got the whole process of leaving and returning as Filipinos, thus the title ‘Ilustrado.’
How did it enhance the narrative, which is, for my lack of a pretentious description, a detective story?
Interestingly enough, the patterns and the structure I’ve tried to put together have allowed me a great breadth. I first wrote it as straight narrative, and it came out to 100,000 words…
Oh my God.
Yes! It was 400 pages; it was massive! Then I thought, okay, this is my first book, no one’s gonna publish this, it’s thick, it’s heavy, it’s exploring things like atheism, Christianity, communism—which has its merits but we tend to overlook because it was such a failure—and what must be done to the Philippines.
As a 400-page manuscript it didn’t work. So I cut it all up, opened 10 different Word documents, and I put every thread in each document. And separated them.
It’s funny because I watched this old VHS tape about the weavers in Mindanao and I thought, wow, what a stupid metaphor but maybe I should weave it! So that’s what I did, I wove them and I cut it down to 80,000 words. I let the gaps speak for themselves.
And it worked...
I believe that in this day and age, the truth is fragmented. You get it from newspapers, TV, blogs, chismis, school, wherever. I’ve got a scene in ‘Ilustrado’ where the protagonist is flipping through channels. I use that as a device to sweep over what’s happening in the Philippines. Our socio-political reality!
I’ve got Boy Bastos jokes, riddles, newspaper excerpts, overheard conversations on a PAL flight to Bacolod… it’s all these different things happening in the periphery that make a whole.
One big criticism of the novel as a whole is that some people don’t get it at all, they say there’s nothing happening, it doesn’t make sense, or “it’s so magulo!” But that is the point, when you take it as a whole, it all comes together.
A line from your book – “Literature is the ambiguous line between fact and fiction” – seems to be a wink at the reader because you’ve explored that theme in your novel, where you play around solicitously with fact and fiction.
I’m trying to blur the difference between fact and fiction. The protagonist is named Miguel. A lot of the stories and figures might be construed as real. But this is a fictional Philippines. Yet there are many things that are true. Not necessarily factual, but true nonetheless.
I hate the fact that we think, ‘Okay, I’m reading fiction, now I’m going to be entertained,’ or ‘Okay, I’m reading non-fiction I’m gonna derive life lessons from this so I should take this seriously.’ I think that’s all false! So I’m trying to shake that up.
Did anyone believe any of your fictional characters was real?
I pitched my story to an agent in New York and they passed it on to three other agents and they had trouble with it. They came back to me and said, “It has parts that are very good, but why are there so many excerpts from this Crispin Salvador writer?”
They thought Crispin was real! So I thought, yay, galeng! They’re gonna be so happy that I fooled them! Because what writer doesn’t want to build a character that is so real that everybody thinks it is?
So did they pick it up?
No! They got upset (laughs). They passed on my novel. But still, I got this wonderful feeling that, Wow, I created a character that people thought was real!
You cite late National Artist, NVM Gonzalez, who was one of your Creative Writing teachers, as great influence. Were you able to veer away from his style, or is there a lot of his influence in it?
There is, well, I hate to use the word “parody,” but I do react to it to a certain extent. NVM was a valuable mentor; he meant a lot to me; he was the first person who believed in my work enough to get it published. But I found myself writing like him too much.
Like Bienvenido Santos, Carlos Bulosan—I love their work. But I can’t write like them, because I need to write like myself. And, therefore, I’m evolving; I’m jumping off from that.
Jessica Hagedorn was also one of my mentors at Columbia University. She told me to be an international writer who happens to be Filipino. I’ve tried to do that, but I’ve also tried to jump off from what she’s done.
As another great Filipino writer, Dean Alfar, once said, you need to build, and then kill your literary fathers.
Yes, exactly! You need to burn the field, to make it more fertile. It took me a while to come to terms with that. But it helps that I’m abroad, I’m working in isolation. It’s very difficult though because I don’t have the affirmation, I don’t have a support group.
How has living abroad helped your writing?
One thing I’ve learned while away is the value of rewriting. Here, I’d write a story and try to get it published. I’d only revise it for spelling. I’ve learned to also take from other cultures. I think as Filipinos, we share the background with Latin Americans, and also the thinking that we can write magical realistically. I don’t agree. We need to move forward from that.
Just like social realism—it doesn’t all have to be all left-wing Marxist writing like from Russia or Cuba. We are international, we’re Filipino, we’re Spanish, we’re American; we are all of those things at the same time! And if we write as all of those at the same time, we’ll write authentically Filipino.
Would you say you’re more patriotic when you are away?
I think so! These past seven years, I’ve had to seek out the Philippines in my memory and in my heart; I’ve had to cook my own Filipino food. I’d visit my brother in San Francisco and we’d make a pilgrimage to Daly City, an outpost of our diaspora, and feel like, Wow I’m home!
With my background, my parents always wanted me to be a politician. There’s a big sense of frustration that I didn’t pursue that. But I always wanted to be a writer because I thought that I could affect change, more than being a half-hearted politician who would get ruined by something I don’t want to do. Or get killed because I didn’t want to compromise my values.
And I’ve seen that in politics, especially here at home, you do have to compromise to make any sort of change whatsoever. I refuse to compromise so I think writing is the best thing for me.
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